Panel Splintered Over Gulf War Illness Conclusion

August 20, 1997|By N.Y. Times News Service

WASHINGTON — Nearly half the members of a special White House committee on the illnesses of gulf war veterans say they will urge that the panel reverse itself and conclude that Iraqi chemical weapons may be an important factor in the veterans' health problems.

Their views suggest a dramatic turnaround in the final report by the panel, which said in an interim report to President Clinton in January that chemical weapons were ``unlikely'' to be a cause of the illnesses reported by thousands of veterans of the Persian Gulf war. The committee instead singled out wartime stress as a likely cause of the ailments.

In interviews, five of the 11 members of the panel, the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Veterans' Illnesses, said they were impressed by new evidence showing that clouds of gases from chemical weapons might have traveled much farther across the battlefield than previously reported by the Defense Department.

A Pentagon report issued last month estimated that nerve gas wafted over as many as 98,900 troops - one of every seven Americans who served in the region - from the demolition of the Kamisiyah ammunition depot in southern Iraq in March 1991, shortly after the war.

Some of the panel members said they were also intrigued by studies, published last January in The Journal of the American Medical Association, in which University of Texas researchers said the illnesses of gulf war veterans appeared to be a result of exposure to a combination of chemicals, including nerve gas.

The six other members of the White House panel either did not return telephone calls for comment or referred the calls to the committee. At least some of these members are expected to stand behind the earlier conclusion that chemical weapons are unlikely to be the cause of illnesses among the veterans.

But that almost half the panel's members are now willing to speak out publicly in favor of revising the committee's conclusions would suggest that the findings will be reversed, or at least will be a subject of heated debate when the committee holds its final public hearings next month in Alexandria, Va.

``This is worth fighting for,'' said Thomas P. Cross, a committee member who is a gulf war veteran. ``I still think that there's no one single cause of the health problems, but we now know that the chemicals were scattered across the battlefield.''